Prominent Renaissance scholars reveal new insights into Piero’s life and work based on a study of his exquisite small panel paintings.

This book tells the story of Italian Renaissance master Piero della Francesca (1411/13-1492) by focusing on four paintings he created over the span of his career. It also provides the first study of his small-scale devotional paintings, including the exquisite 'Saint Jerome and a Donor'. One of today's most prominent scholars narrates the painting's mysterious history and uncovers new insights gleaned during its recent study and restoration. The author explores the relationship between this painting and other works made by Piero for private devotion, including one of his last and most striking paintings, the magnificent 'Madonna di Senigallia'. New research describes the complex relationships between Piero and his patrons and other contemporaries. This book brims with revelatory details about Piero's work that will intrigue both casual readers and devoted fans of the artist, and will form a gateway to a larger analysis of Piero's overall body of work.0Exhibition: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA (13.1.-30.3.2014).

Thousands of travelers visit Tuscany and Umbria each year to follow the Piero della Francesca Trail. John Pope-Hennessy examines each work of Piero della Francesca. Included is Aldous Huxley's essay "The Best Picture, " which inspired Pope-Hennessy to seek out these paintings and frescoes. 56 photos.

"This book provides a survey of European painting between 1260 and 1510, in both northern and southern Europe, based largely on the National Gallery collection ... some 70 of the finest and best known paintings in the Gallery are examined in detail"--Cover.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Bode-Museum, Berlin, Aug. 25-Nov. 20, 2011, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Dec. 21, 2011-Mar. 18, 2012.

As one of the most innovative and enlightened painters of the early Italian Renaissance, Piero della Francesca brought space, luminosity, and unparalleled subtlety to painting. In addition, Piero invented the role of the modern artist by becoming a traveler, a courtier, a geometrician, a patron, and much else besides. In this nuanced account of this great painter’s life and art, Machtelt Brüggen Israëls reconstructs how Piero came of age. Successfully demystifying the persistent notion of Piero’s art as enigmatic, she reveals the simple and stunning intentions behind his work.

The fifteenth-century Italian artist Piero della Francesca painted a familiar world. Roads wind through hilly landscapes, run past farms, sheds, barns, and villages. This is the world in which Piero lived. At the same time, Piero’s paintings depict a world that is distant. The subjects of his pictures are often Christian and that means that their setting is the Holy Land, a place Piero had never visited. The Realism of Piero della Francesca studies this paradoxical aspect of Piero’s art. It tells the story of an artist who could think of the local churches, palaces, and landscapes in and around his hometown of Sansepolcro as miraculously built replicas of the monuments of Jerusalem. Piero’s application of perspective, to which he devoted a long treatise, was meant to convince his contemporaries that his paintings report on things that Piero actually observed. Piero’s methodical way of painting seems to have offered no room for his own fantasy. His art looks deliberately styleless. This book uncovers a world in which painting needed to validate itself by cultivating the illusion that it reported on things observed instead of things imagined by the artist. Piero’s painting claimed truth in a world of increasing uncertainties.

Raphael has been the indispensable reference point for countless artists, great and small, Italian and non-Italian. His frescoes in the Vatican quickly asserted themselves as paradigms of the Grand Manner, while his serenely beautiful Madonnas and calmly dignified portraits redefined their respective genres. The combination of clarity and complexity in his compositions results in an ineffable quality of innate grace that many artists have since tried to emulate. Not only Parmigianino, Carracci, Poussin, Ingres, and Degas but Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Manet, and Picasso also mined Raphael's works for inspiration. The Colonna Altarpiece is the only altarpiece by Raphael in an American collection. Raphael painted this work in his early twenties for a convent of nuns in Perugia on the eve of his move to Florence. The two main panels of the altarpiece were bought by former Museum president J. Pierpont Morgan, and later given as a gift to the Museum's Collection in 1916. This volume accompanies an exhibition that reunites all seven parts of the altarpiece for the first time since the seventeenth century: the two main panels in the Metropolitan together with the five components of its predella, divided among the Metropolitan, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and the National Gallery and the Dulwich Picture Gallery, both in London. Also included is a fine selection of paintings and drawings by Raphael executed during the same period, 1502-5 A.D. Additionally, this exhibition showcases a preliminary study, now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, for the landscape in the Metropolitan's altarpiece, as well as the beautiful painting Madonna and Child with a Book from the Norton Simon Art Foundation in Pasadena. These works document one of the pivotal moments in Raphael's career, when the young artist abandoned Perugia, in Umbria, and set his sights on Florence, where he encountered the work of Fra Bartolommeo and Leonardo da Vinci. To contextualize the transformative effect of this move, paintings by his master, Perugino, as well as by Pinturicchio and Fra Bartolommeo are also exhibited. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

"This book ... [shows] how the artist worked out his developing ideas primarily through drawing. Included are examples of work from his early years, such as the preparatory drawings he made as a muralist for the WPA in the 1930s, in addition to the increasingly abstract work of the 1940s and 1950s, and the sequence of pictorial experiments that led to his reintroduction of the figure in the late 1960s. Also reproduced, in color, are a number of painterly gouaches and a series of acrylics"--Back cover.